Manufacturing plants make products that are typically packaged, often in boxes. In large-scale operations, automated packaging systems may replace human labor to automatically place products into packages.
In a typical manufacturing plant, large volumes of identical products are typically manufactured in an assembly line process, and submitted, in large volumes to an automated packaging system for packaging. Because the products are identical, individual products conveyed through the automated packaging system need not be specifically tracked. If one or more of the products submitted to the automated packaging system does not ultimately exit the automated packaging system, the impact to the fulfillment of orders for that product can be easily minimized simply by manufacturing and packaging a few extra of the products. While this approach runs the risk of manufacturing a few extra products that have not yet been ordered, the impact to the fulfillment of existing orders is typically low, since no time or operator effort need be consumed in tracking down missing products. That is, if a product entering the automated packaging system does not exit the automated packaging system for any reason, since the product is not unique, the order can be fulfilled by grabbing the next (filled) package out of the automated packaging system.
In contrast, if a manufacturing plant must fill customized orders (i.e., orders that specify different product(s) from one order to the next), then the specific product(s) associated with each order must be tracked between input and output of the automated packaging system so that each package exiting the automated packaging system may be identified as being associated with its respective order. For example, in a manufacturing plant that manufacturers business cards in stacks to be boxed and shipped to different individual customers who ordered the business cards (wherein presumably the content imprinted on the business cards of each stack is different), each box coming out of the automated boxing system may have different contents from each other box and must be matched up with its order so that it can be shipped to the correct address. If, for whatever reason, fewer boxes of business cards come out of the automated boxing system than number of business card stacks submitted to the automated boxing system, the operator must track down which customized business card stack is missing. This can cause significant delay and can hold up the shipping of the entire run of orders.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have techniques for automatically tracking and matching up packages conveyed through an automated packaging system with the specific order to which they belong.